Community-based intermodal facilities, as now conceptualized, induce large-scale pedestrian movements based upon the cumulative pedestrian supportive characteristics of the urban habitat features (the pedestrian-orientation thereof that will hereinafter be referenced as “pedestrian-oriented” structures, building facades components, corridors, transit, hardscape, landscape, or other elements of the urban built environment); increase multimodal transportation system usage by use of innovative corridor, parking, and community transit strategies, and other methods to induce large-scale pedestrian intermodal access; and, stimulate economic, and community, and personal development.
Through the use of pedestrian-oriented corridor and community transit strategies, abundant shared-use, parking structures reduce traffic congestion, frame the new pedestrian-oriented urban form, and reduce private developer costs normally associated with parking requirements. Further, such intermodal community development strategies can provide: more affordable housing and business locations; economic growth for diverse business, social and residential populations; and, a variety of enhanced education, health, and quality of life opportunities.
Moreover, by using governmental transportation trust funds and other public infrastructure financing techniques to develop such community-based, pedestrian-oriented intermodal transportation solutions (parking, community transit, and the public places that help to gather passengers in preparation for intermodal transfers) and reserving the use of private investor funds for a variety of mixed-use projects that support economic development, the financial burdens on local governments related to such intermodal improvements are reduced. This method to reduce traffic congestion and promote community development helps to grow the local tax base and enables these community and transportation improvements to be self-supporting.
These recommendations require a paradigm shift. Transportation trust funds and other governmental funds used to build highways must be used to develop a built environment that induce travelers to abandon their nearly exclusive dependence on the single-occupant, private passenger automobile, to use other modes of transportation as part of virtually every automotive trip (making every trip to some degree multimodal) and to productively interact with community residents, visitors, and business, educational, and social institutions in the new pedestrian-oriented urban and suburban centers along major highway corridors and in the redeveloped city and town centers.
A premise of this invention is that world-class mobility and exceptional economic growth can be more readily achieved through the development of seamless multimodal transportation systems, not more road building; therefore a prudent transportation policy would be to use available road building funds to fully develop community-based, pedestrian-oriented intermodal facilities and related community and multimodal improvements. Development of such community intermodal systems (“CIS”) as herein described is a method to achieve sustainable world-class mobility and exceptional economic growth by the development of parking and pedestrian linkages between various modes of transport (especially between cars and rail transit), as well as conditions that will tend to improve the natural environment of the intermodal community and the quality of life (i.e., intellectual growth, emotional well-being, physical health and capabilities) of the residents and frequent visitors to such intermodal communities.
Transportation systems and community development in the best of circumstances should represent the two sides of the same coin. The community should provide for every need of each citizen and visitor and the transportation system should provide high quality citizen and visitor access to those needs.
In the last fifty years, there has been a growing incompatibility between the requirements of an automotive-based transportation system and the urban community capacity to satisfy citizen and visitor needs. Traffic congestion, air and water quality degradation, pedestrian and automotive fatalities, slum and blight are but a few of the community problems that have surfaced as road networks expand and lengthen to satisfy mobility demands.
Fortunately, transportation policy initiatives to support intermodal improvements may provide a basis for mutually beneficial community and transportation system enhancements. Like modern airport terminals, these intermodal improvements should respond to both the need to park automobiles near opportunities to board alternative transport modes and provide for an environment where basic human needs are satisfied (places to eat, read, talk and sit) until the next segment of a multimodal trip begins.
Like the best of communities, these needs should be provided not only within the built environments, but also, in the out-of-doors public spaces dispersed throughout the community and urban centers. These areas must be protected from the harshness and discomfort of the natural elements, e.g., too cold, too hot, too wet or humid, too bright or too dark by the structural components of the built environment and therefore are functionally defined as the habitable and desirable places in the spaces between building. Within these public places, the distances actually walked should be mitigated and flexible to provide exercise, but not exhaustion. On the other hand, the dimensions of these urban and suburban centers need to be large enough to accommodate the significant and varied development that support large-scale pedestrian movements and multimodal access and usage.
This invention presents a fundamentally new way of assembling the building blocks of an intermodal transportation system into sustainable high-quality communities that provides a basis for world-class economic growth throughout a wide diversity of the citizenry.
To understand the premises upon which the invention is based, it is necessary to focus on both the macro-transportation systems and human-scale community issues that are required for the development of creative, successful, and historically inspired communities. Broadly speaking, transportation systems in America are large capital investments that must accommodate large numbers of private passenger automobiles and, in the case of transportation systems using aircraft, transit or waterborne vessels, large numbers of parked cars and pedestrian movements from parked cars to and within intermodal terminal facilities.
In most developed and rapidly developing nations, everyone wants to drive to their destination. In doing so, however, some very bad things can happen. In America, hundreds of thousands of people suffer sudden accidental death on congested highways (see: Mean Streets 2004 at: http://www.transact.org/library/reports_html/ms2004/pdf/Final_Mean_Streets—2004—4.pdf); millions of people suffer with chronic illnesses due to stress, air pollution, and lack of physical exercise (see: Suburban Sprawl and Physical and Mental Health at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcqi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15351221&dopt=Citation); and, the social behavior amongst Americans looks less fraternal, and more aggressively adverse, with each passing year (see: Fast Facts from Texas Department of Public Safety, Road Rage at: http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/director_staff/public_information/Fast_facts/roadrage.pdf; Road Rage Becoming Commonplace: Survey at: http://autonet.ca/Safety/story.cfm?story=/Safety/2004/11/15/715913.html; and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Road Rage Survey reference at: http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/about/outreach/dsweek/survey.htm). Many similar sources and observations can be referenced for other car-dominated urban communities around the world and it is expected that such road rage behavior will become more recognized in all car-dominated communities absent the use of the present invention in those world communities.
What should be readily understood is that the travel needs of a speeding automobile (wide, smooth asphalt or concrete surfaces) are exactly the opposite of the safe, comfortable, useful and interesting environments that humans respond to favorably. In short, the natural and best environment for the automobile is inherently a risk and hazard to humans who are not enclosed within the protective cocoon of their own automobile, otherwise separated from the automotive traffic. Conversely, the typical human habitats, i.e., your living room, bedroom and office are not suitable for the operation of an automobile at typical design speeds, e.g., 30 to 60 miles per hour or more.
Modern architecture and community designs, however, assume the automobile is welcome everywhere. It is precisely this lack of awareness that moving cars and people don't mix very well, that causes most of the design flaws of our built environment. Flaws that adversely impact all components of our communities and that will hopefully be rectified by the methods described below.
This does not mean that cars should not be used for many or even most of the trips between the urban, suburban and rural environments. Nor does it mean that car trips are no longer enjoyable and rewarding in very specific car-friendly circumstances: non-congested traffic conditions; interesting views of the natural and built environments that can be observed from a moving vehicle; the comfort of lounge-like seating during air-conditioned, smooth, and uninterrupted car trips; and, the entertainment, food and beverages that can be consumed during such car trips.
As one of the world's major industry, automotive-based transportation systems represent billions of dollars of investments in the movement, care, and feeding of the car-driving public. Such automotive related investments, however, can not be used as intended and do not provide the benefits envisioned when chronic car traffic congestion destroys productivity and mobility, fouls the air we breath, degrades the esthetics and physically conditions of the natural environment, and helps to support the sedentary lifestyle and obesity epidemic evident in America and other developed nations of the world.
What this does mean, however, is that as more and more of our streets and communities become congested with traffic, continued car use in those congested areas is not cost effective or beneficial and alternative modes of transportation must be successfully encouraged. In traffic congested communities, the air quality endangers health and urban blight threatens safety and the community esthetics, not to mention the economic vitality of the urban and suburban centers. This also means phase-out of car dominated systems of movements from home-to-work-to-home and to social events and the events of daily life in order to:                reinforce a non-sedentary lifestyle;        increase walking, running, and other exercise that is anatomically appropriate for the healthy human condition and that would not typically occur with the continuous availability of car movements; and,        reduce public health risks due to obesity, traffic injuries and deaths, and diminished air quality.        
When traffic congestion is a dominant factor of daily life, the allurement and efficiencies of automotive movements are diminished due to substantial loss of work and leisure time, a reducing of quality of life, and increasingly dangerous driving conditions and, within a very short time period (a decade or so), the community benefits of car movements can vanish.
In virtually all growing urban and suburban communities, a time comes when more road building no longer is a cost effective means to reduce traffic congestion. Limited right-of-way opportunities in already developed areas, very high costs for right-of-way acquisitions in urban and suburban areas, and significant business losses associated with the right-of-way acquired for road expansion projects, collectively constrain the physical, financial, and public support conditions necessary for recurring road building options. Not withstanding diminished road building efforts, development continues and traffic congestion exacerbates.
When road networks are build outward from the urban and suburban center in more rural communities to avoid such road building and right-of-way constraints, traffic congestion worsens as more cars driving longer distances, traffic conditions leave fewer places to safely walk from one necessary destination to another, and car movements become the only real option notwithstanding the chronic traffic congestion, loss of mobility, and other adverse, but related, effects to health, the economy, and the environment.
What it does mean is that continued road building is a counter productive and self-defeating mobility strategy that creates adverse conditions that community intermodal system development can remedy. By development of intermodally enhanced, pedestrian-oriented urban communities with very significant and convenient, but mostly invisible, parking capacity, this expansion of the roadway transportation system (highways and the intermodally linked mixed-use pedestrian-oriented parking structures) will accommodate more car traffic by diverting large numbers of cars from the highways and local streets into mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented parking structures and thereafter inducing the car occupants to leave their cars behind as they complete their daily trips using a variety of modal options (walking, bicycles, transit, airplanes and water-borne vessels).
When such community-based intermodal facilities are provided within the urban and suburban built environments, we would keep driving our cars, but when the traffic congestion occurs, we would park, walk, and use transit to regain mobility, reducing energy demands, improving health, air quality, and the economic conditions for each resident and visitor to such pedestrian-oriented, parking enriched, and intermodal enhanced city and town centers
In any monolithic system, fundamental design flaws can lead to systems failures with catastrophic consequences. While car only (or car dominated) movements within the urban and suburban communities and transportation systems, puts all residents and visitors at risk, a multimodal transportation system, with efficient and robust pedestrian-oriented intermodal improvements, will make the entire community safe, secure, sustainable and economically successful.
The question that needs to be responded to is specifically what type of intermodal improvements to the transportation system would be good for both the car-driving public in the frequently driven to cities and towns and still support the larger community interests. Further, it must be determined how to reorganize the urban and suburban centers to covert the build and natural environmental conditions from traffic congested, dangerous, unhealthy, unsightly and poor (“slum and blight conditions”) into the sustainable, high quality communities that represent the economic engines of a great nation.